A number of studies of individual and institutional racism tend to suggest that racist attitudes and overt behavior are functions of ignorance and lack of opportunity for actual interaction on a one-to-one or group basis across racial lines. Controlled experiments with groups confirm that exposure to members of other races in cooperative, meaningful situations tend to narrow social distance, increase racial understanding and generally improve relations. What has so far not been done is how to translate these observations into teachable skills in a way that will produce methods of intervening in actual social relations. The pursuit of desegregation in education inevitably leads to increased interracial contact, but this contact still largely takes the form of aloofness, benign neglect, begrudged sufferance, and in the extreme cases, confrontation. Successful desegregation requires also a cooperative environment. The purpose of this research is to develop a training model to identify specific learnable skills and methods of absorbing them, and to test these skills for effectiveness in coping with institutional and cultural racism. The project falls into four parts: (1) A survey of a random sample drawn from the UMBC community to determine racial attitudes and climate. This will be followed by a pre-test of racial attitudes of those who will be in the training group for correspondence with the larger sample. (2) Application of the training model (details below). (3) Post-test of the trainee group. (4) A follow-up study-evaluation research - of the impact of the trainees on the UMBC community.